As social networks become more pervasive and change the way we interact, New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas asks what happens "to our minds and our hearts when we become digital people?" Is the social web the world finds itself tangled in a totally new experience?

Anand Giridharadas doesn't think so. He draws parallels between the "ambient sociability" of village life in Bombay with the sprawling online communities we now interact with daily.

Anand Girid­haradas

Anand Giridharadas is an author and New York Times columnist. He writes the “Admit One” column for The Times’s arts pages, and the “Letter from America” for its global edition. He is the author of the new book “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Texas’s Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him. In 2011 he published “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” about returning to the India his parents left.